A blind color digital image watermarking method based on image correction and eigenvalue decomposition

With the rapid development of Internet technology, the copyright protection of color images has become more and more important. In order to fulfill this purpose, this paper designs a blind color digital image watermarking method based on image correction and eigenvalue decomposition (EVD). Firstly, all the eigenvalues of the pixel block in the color host image are obtained by EVD. Then, the sum of the absolute value of the eigenvalues is quantified by the variable quantization steps to embed the color watermark image that encrypted by affine transform and encoded by the Hamming code. If the watermarked image is processed by geometric attack, then the attacked image can be corrected by using the geometric attributes. Finally, the inverse embedding process is performed to extract the color watermark. Moreover, the advantages of the proposed method are shown as follows: (1) all Peak Signal-to-noise Ratio (PSNR) values are greater than 42 dB; (2) the average Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) values are greater than 0.97; (3) the maximum embedded capacity is 0.25bpp; (4) whole running-time is less than 20 s; (5) the key space is more than 2(450); (6) most Normalized Cross-correlation (NC) values are more than 0.9. Compared with the related methods, the experimental results show that the proposed method not only has better watermark invisibility and larger watermark capacity, but also has higher security and stronger robustness against geometric attacks.